Coming Into His Own

Pinchot, who arrived at Exeter in the fall 1881, credited the Academy with giving each student "the best possible chance to follow his own bent," which for the budding naturalist meant dividing his time between the classroom and the surrounding meadows, bogs and woods. His daily calendar was packed tight with extracurricular activities, from sports to Bible study to clowning with his classmates (Pinchot is fourth from the bottom).

Born in 1865 in Simsbury, CT, the first child of James and Mary Eno Pinchot, Gifford had been raised within households of wealth and privilege. His father was a successful New York merchant; his maternal grandfather, Amos Richard Eno, had scored big in Manhattan real estate, the Donald Trump of his era. As a child, Pinchot moved between the Eno-owned Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Enos' Simsbury estate, and Europe. Taught by tutors on two continents, his first formal educational experience came at Exeter.

How apt that the school seemed in a state of chaos when Pinchot entered the Academy. Founded a century earlier, when its instructors had been empowered to "regulate the tempers, to enlarge the minds, and form the morals of the youth committed to their care," Exeter struggled in the 1880s to meet these pedagogical aspirations. That was in good part because of growing tensions between the school's faculty and Principal Albert Perkins and his immediate successors. It would not be until after Pinchot's years at Exeter that the Academy would undergo a startling reformation, becoming one of the nation's most respected secondary schools.

Despite this unsettled environment, Pinchot thrived at Exeter. He appeared to come into his own, his family agreed, most obviously in his almost-professional fascination with the sciences. This led his mother to encourage an acquaintance of hers, A.H. Gesner, to correspond with her son about the prospects of a scientific career.

Actually, Gesner wrote to warn the 18-year-old student about "the number of [scientists] who fail to see God in nature," men who "persuade themselves that all the nice, the fine, the delicate adjustments and arrangements of beasts, birds, and flowers, came of themselves or were a spontaneous or developed form." Although Gesner hoped Gifford had "not met with them yet," he would in time, if only because there were so many scientists "who do not believe in God at all." More to the point, he prayed that young Pinchot would "prepare his mind to defend the truth and be a Champion for God in Nature," leading the way out of perfidy and into the light. What "we want," he concluded, "[are] Christian scientific men."

Although Gesner may have perceived himself to be part of an embattled minority, he was, in fact, solidly in the mainstream of 19th-century thought. As the historian Charles Rosenberg has argued, for those such as Gesner "the study of God's works never implied skepticism towards their Author"; for them, "moral and scientific progress did not seem contradictory but . . . inevitably parallel and complementary." He was not alone, which is why he and his peers "could move fluidly from one intellectual and emotional realm to another" and be at peace.

So was Gifford Pinchot, for Exeter provided him with ample opportunities to shift from one branch of knowledge to the other. Many Sundays found him engrossed in F.W. Farrar's massive two-volume The Life and Work of St. Paul (1879) that his mother had given him-"I like [it] very much and I do not confine myself to reading it on Sunday"-and then just as enthralled by tromping through the meadows, probing the bogs and exploring the forests that lay in and around the town of Exeter. He spent long hours conferring with his chaplain about consecrating his life to Christ (a calling he continued to contemplate throughout his college years), and even more time chasing butterflies and trapping bugs to add to his natural history collections. The world that God created offered unlimited possibilities for a young man who, as a family friend noted, seemed a "confirmed naturalist."

This world also offered an amazing number of distractions. Gifford's parents worried about the deleterious impact that the school's extracurricular activities were having on Gifford's studies, and well they might. His letters teemed with news of his participation in a daunting array of sports and organizations. Depending on the season, he played lacrosse, football or tennis, and reveled in the school's athletic camaraderie, in being among the "jubilant multitude" that surged through campus following victory. This sense of brotherhood was enhanced in other ways-through regular attendance at Bible study classes and participation in the Gideon Lane Soule Literary Society and other clubs whose meetings packed his daily calendar. This swirl of activity left him puzzled: "When I first came here I got the impression from the boys that this was one of the dullest places on the face of the earth," he confided to his mother in 1882. But "I have certainly been to more entertainments this winter than if I had stayed at home."

That revelation left James Pinchot sputtering. Parties were not supposed to be "the object of your winter," he wrote. "Study is the thing now." When Gifford learned how to learn-the reason, after all, that he had been sent to Exeter-when "I hear that you are doing all your lessons easily and well," then might he re-engage in the social round. As for Gifford's election as captain of the lacrosse club, his father offered no support: "It seems to me that you cannot hold this position of responsibility . . . and still attend to your lessons." Trying to accomplish both would lead to failure. "It is a case of attempting to serve two masters." The young Pinchot capitulated, and cut back on his extracurricular activities. "It is very hard to keep my manners and bearing what they should be," he wrote in deference to his father's demands, "when there is no one to caution me when I go wrong."

Pinchot's forays into the wilderness began as a boy, and continued throughout his life and throughout the entire country, including this 1898 winter camping trip in the Adirondacks.

A dearth of cautionary words was the last thing Gifford needed to worry about. His parents continued to offer an unceasing flow of advice on his eating habits, exercise regimen and general health. They quibbled with how he held his pen, demanded that he write with greater regularity-"you are to write your letters twice a week on the days mentioned, and no excuses"-and with greater care. Their justification for this barrage linked character with action: if "[he is] never to have any backbone or resolution even in the little matters," how would he have any in larger affairs? Managing his life required a sense of discipline the elder Pinchot did not yet sense in his teenage son. "Do not, I beg of you, attempt any spasmodic effort . . . [but] go straight along evenly and carefully and you will get on well enough." Avoid intemperate action, conserve energy, make efficient use of time-this future leader of the American conservation movement could not have been better prepared to embrace its rhetorical stress on rationality, order and control.

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